Bizzoche and Tertiaries: Options for Women in Early Modern Malta

Abstract

Devout laywomen across different regions of early modern Europe developed their own distinctive lifestyles, nomenclature and communities. The history of bizzoche and tertiaries in early modern Malta is still largely unexplored. Through archival material, this paper provides an initial overview of the women who opted for a semi-religious lifestyle in Malta in the period up to c.1700, examining their modes of living and status within society. It also examines their position within the structures of the Church in Malta, shaped by both societal and ecclesiastical norms and the female Christian experience, within the context of the Catholic Reformation.

1. Beginnings

From the earliest years of Christianity and throughout the medieval period, men and women seeking to lead devout and ascetic lives retreated from secular life as recluses, hermits or anchorites living in churches, cells or caves. Others withdrew by joining the communities of open or closed monasteries.

By the early sixteenth century, non-cloistered communities of women were known as open monasteries (monasteri aperti) in Italy. Some of them housed women who had taken solemn vows but did not practice enclosure. Others consisted of laywomen who had taken simple vows. Some women were recognised as tertiaries, as they were linked to a third order, either living in a community as regular tertiaries or living at home as secular tertiaries. Laywomen taking simple vows and secular tertiaries are often referred to as having a ‘semi-religious’ or ‘quasi-religious’ status and lifestyle. Male tertiaries and other religious laymen also existed, but men had many more options than women for a religious life.

The mystic St. Catherine of Siena (1347–1380), who was canonised in 1461, was a pious laywoman and an early role model for semi-religious women. She had joined the Sisters of Penitence of St. Dominic in Siena, who followed the spirituality of St. Dominic and wore distinctive habits. Other examples of pious laywomen who were widely admired include St. Margaret of Cortona (1247–1297) and the mystic St. Angela of Foligno (1248–1309), who followed the spirituality of St. Francis.

Devout laywomen across different regions of early modern Europe developed their own distinctive lifestyles, nomenclature and communities. Diverse names were used across the regions of Europe to describe such semi-religious women, such as pinzochere, mantellate, bizzoche, beatas, beguines, dévotes, penitents and tertiaries (Guarnieri 1980) or just ‘religious women’ (mulieres religiosae). Many lived within the secular community at home alone or with relatives or with other women. Some were active in charitable, social activities. Numerous studies have been carried out on specific groups or regions in the medieval and early modern periods, for instance, Simons (2001) on beguines in the Netherlands; Rapley (1990) on dévotes in seventeenth-century France; Esposito (2011) and Odebiyi (2025) on bizzoche in late medieval Rome; and Lehmijoki-Gardner (2005) on Dominican penitent women in Italy.

In Malta, bizzoca and terziaria (tertiary) were the most commonly used terms to describe religious laywomen, who were referred to by the title soru (sister). While the term terziaria identified women specifically associated with a third order, bizzoca was used more generally for all religious laywomen, including terziarie as well as those who were not linked to a third order. Occasionally, the term monaca was also used for semi-religious women in Malta, although mostly this referred to monastic nuns.

To date, bizzoche and female tertiaries in early modern Malta have not been paid much attention in the writing of history. Yet a substantial number of Maltese women opted for this semi-religious lifestyle. The majority were not married, although some were widows and mothers. They professed with simple or solemn vows, they were identifiable by their clothing, as many of them wore religious habits, they devoted themselves to prayer, and they were mostly able to sustain themselves financially through personal incomes of varying levels.

The history of bizzoche and tertiaries in early modern Malta is still largely unexplored. Through archival material, this paper provides an initial overview of the women who opted for a semi-religious lifestyle in the period up to c. 1700, examining their modes of living and status within society. It also examines their position within the structures of the Church in Malta, shaped by both societal and ecclesiastical norms and the female Christian experience, within the context of the Catholic Reformation.

2. Bizzoche in Late Medieval Malta

In order to analyse the broader implications of semi-religious women in Malta, the available facts about them must first be established. What is known about the early history of bizzoche and tertiaries on the island? In the relatively sparse written records of Malta in the fifteenth century, the names of a few secular nuns have surfaced, such as Soru Marculina of Naxxar and an unnamed nun (la monaca) of the hamlet of Tartarni near Dingli. Between 1427 and 1436, both these women owed tithes on land to the Cathedral of Malta (Fiorini 2022, p. lxvi; Fiorini 2023, p. 44). Around 1480, a nun called ‘Ciancia’ (Chanca la Monaca) is listed as living alone at home in Rabat (Fiorini 2002, p. 79). It is not clear whether these women were devoted to the spirituality of a particular religious order, and it is possible that they donned a religious habit and adopted an ascetic lifestyle outside the established ecclesiastical frameworks. There may have been many more such women in medieval Malta, also in earlier centuries.

A community of male Franciscan tertiary regulars existed in Rabat in the fifteenth century and possibly earlier. They may have been active in managing the hospital of St. Francis in Rabat (later renamed Santo Spirito). Their convent is documented in 1442, adjacent to the church and hospital of St. Francis. However, the number of these male tertiaries dwindled, and the convent was transferred to a group of First Order Conventual Franciscans established in Malta in the 1490s (Aquilina and Fiorini 1996, pp. 1–3).

There is no firm evidence to date confirming that any similar communities of female third order regulars existed in fifteenth- or sixteenth-century Malta; however, in 1575, an Apostolic report on the state of the Church in Malta by Mgr Pietro Dusina stated that unless any existing female tertiary monasteries adopted full enclosure and were able to sustain themselves without needing alms, they were to be suppressed (Aquilina and Fiorini 2001, p. 326).1 This suggests that one or more female tertiary houses may have existed in Malta at that time. If so, they would probably have been quite small and limited, and no details about them are known. Until the changes brought about by the Council of Trent from the late sixteenth century onwards, both regular and secular female tertiaries were integrated within society all over the Italian peninsula. In light of Malta’s close links and cultural similarities to Sicily and southern Italy, it is plausible that a similar pattern existed on the island.

By the early sixteenth century, archival evidence of secular female tertiaries in Malta living in their own homes begins to surface, with some identified as following the spirituality of particular religious orders. Among the known cases is the Carmelite tertiary Toria Cassar, who lived in Mdina and drew up her will in 1521.2 The tertiary Giovanna Mifsud rented accommodation in a house in Rabat in 1545 (Buttigieg 2008, p. 60).3 Another two such women are recorded in 1560—the Franciscan tertiary Margarita Azzopardi and the Dominican tertiary Giuliana de Baglio, who gave a donation causa mortis to her son Giuseppe on 11 October 1560.4 There will have been others.

From the late fourteenth century onwards, the Observant movement and reforms influenced lay society with a desire for spirituality through meditation and silence (Zarri 2015, pp. 38–40). This included a renewal of religious life in eremitical solitude, promoting a penitential spirituality through asceticism and contemplation. Late medieval male anchorites or hermits, considered to be holy individuals, also existed in Malta at this period. Anchorites or anchoresses sometimes lived in small churches or in cells attached to them. According to folk legend, a male anchorite named Kerrew first lived beside the church of St. Paul the Hermit in Wied il-Għasel outside the village of Mosta and then moved near the church of the Immaculate Conception in Qala, Gozo (Theuma 2005; G. Azzopardi 2020). In 1575, a hermit was recorded as living in a dwelling attached to the rural church of St. John the Baptist south of the town of Vittoriosa in the parish of Bir Miftuh (Aquilina and Fiorini 2001, p. 195). The practice persisted, and a well-known cave hermit in the 1610s in Malta was the Spanish Fra Juan Benegas de Cordoba, who lived in a grotto beside St. Paul’s church in Rabat (J. Azzopardi 2006; Russo 2013).

Two intriguing instances are known of nuns attached to particular churches in Malta in the mid-sixteenth century. In his parish records, the archpriest of Mdina noted the death on 17 August 1560 of a nun named Mattea ‘of the church of the Saviour’—monaca dila ecclesia del Salvatore. Soon afterwards, in the 1570s, this church—which was adjacent to today’s Palazzo Falson—was used as a schoolroom (Buhagiar and Fiorini 1996, p. 423). Moreover, a list of the heads of households in Mdina in 1561 includes the nun of the church of St. Nicholas—‘la monaca di Santo Nicolao’ (Buhagiar and Fiorini 1996, pp. 406, 511). It is possible that these two small churches were used by these religious women as anchorages. Fifteen years later, in 1575, both these churches were described as neglected and without rectors, which supports the idea that they may have been used as anchorages for a while.

3. Tridentine Reforms

The notion of fuga mundi and enclosure or ‘clausura’ was an ancient religious ideal. Enclosure had always been regarded as a fundamental element of contemplative life, emphasising silence, solitude and separation from the secular community. Both men and women aspired to this state of contemplation, yet ecclesiastical rules on enclosure were enforced more strictly for women, endeavouring to create a protected, inviolable space for virgins considered to be the ‘brides of Christ’. Historically, women were seen as the weaker sex, vulnerable to temptation and sin. This gender-biased view highly valued the protection of female chastity and virginity.

The monastic ideal for nuns had thus always involved some form of enclosure. However, the extent of the restrictions varied widely across medieval European cities. Many religious women either did not want or could not live in full enclosure. From a practical perspective, they needed to engage with the world outside the monastery walls to be able to support themselves financially.

A renewed insistence on strict enclosure for nuns was decreed in 1298 in Pope Boniface VIII’s ‘Periculoso’, which strived to fundamentally reform the religious life of women throughout the Christian world. The Pope mandated that nuns could only leave their monasteries due to contagious illness or life-threatening danger, and only authorised individuals were to be allowed entry into a female cloister. Legal transactions were to be conducted by a procurator on behalf of the nuns. Nuns were not to conduct any work outside the monastery, nor to meet with benefactors and donors freely, nor to offer accommodation to laywomen. These rules made it challenging for female monasteries to sustain themselves, and they were instructed not to accept new members unless they had sufficient resources to support them.

However, by and large, the implementation of Periculoso over the next 250 years was arbitrary and lax. Different versions of religious life for women, including secular tertiary nuns who lived at home, continued to exist widely across Europe in the late medieval period. Enclosure was not observed uniformly at female monasteries, which developed their own constitutions and customs across the different regions and cities of Europe. Some had special privileges granted to them by local prelates, which could get in the way of the monastic ideal.

The observance of enclosure was still fragmented in the early sixteenth century when the Council of Trent was convened. At the final session of the Council in 1563, it was stipulated that strict enclosure for all nuns should be renewed where it had been violated (ubi violata fuerit) and retained where it had not been violated.

Yet many female monasteries were reluctant to change their way of life or give up privileges. Some women had never observed enclosure at all, such as the tertiaries and semi-religious women who lived openly in the community. Did enclosure apply to them too? In 1566, Pope Pius V tackled the question in his Circa pastoralis, reasserting that all nuns must observe strict enclosure and take solemn vows and attempting to impose a uniform model of life for religious women.

While enclosure was hardly a novel policy, its reaffirmation by the ecclesiastical authorities in the mid-sixteenth century triggered visible and wide-ranging changes in behaviour patterns at female monasteries over the next three centuries. Prelates began to take the ideal of enclosure more seriously among the religious women under their jurisdiction.

As things turned out, however, it proved impossible to put an end to the practice of women opting for semi-religious lifestyles outside the established and regulated monasteries, including in Malta. The archival evidence demonstrates that women did not only choose between marriage or the cloister (aut maritus aut murus), but a significant number also opted for a semi-religious life. In any case, in Malta, there were not enough monasteries to cater for the number of religious vocations. This was also the case in other countries such as Spain (Weber 2016a, p. 6). Moreover, older women and widows did not typically enter monasteries as solemnly professed nuns. Apart from the Magdalene monastery of repentite in Valletta, most new entrants into cloistered life in Malta were young, unmarried girls aged under twenty. Financial reasons also came into play. Not all women could afford the relatively high cost of the dowry required to enter a monastery, although this was not the only deciding factor, as some affluent women also opted to live as bizzoche at home.

In July 1574, Pope Gregory XIII appointed Monsignor Pietro Dusina, an Italian lawyer and priest, as an apostolic visitor to assess the state of the Church in Malta. Dusina was a determined reformer, focused on initiating the Catholic Reformation in Malta (Aquilina and Fiorini 2001, pp. xiii–xxvi). During his visit, he also focused on religious women on the island. He went to St. Peter’s monastery in Mdina in January 1575 and noted that the nuns sometimes attended Mass at the Mdina Cathedral, novices were visiting their families at Easter and Christmas, and the nuns used an internal door to meet their relatives inside the church. Some scandalous incidents that took place earlier in the sixteenth century also suggest that the monastery doors were not that secure. The nuns in Mdina were evidently not observing strict enclosure rules, which was a common issue in monasteries across Sicily and Italy too.

Dusina attempted to implement the Tridentine reforms, and he laid down new rules for female monasteries in Malta. Nuns were not to leave the monastery once they entered as novices and started wearing the habit, and they could not profess before turning sixteen. They were not permitted to enter the church to speak to people and could only enter it for the induction of a new nun or to decorate its interior when the main church door was closed. Secular young girls could reside at the monastery, but once they exited for any reason, they were not allowed to return. Dusina also provided guidelines to ensure the monastery’s sustainability by limiting the number of nuns that could be accepted. As elsewhere in Europe, strict enclosure at Maltese monasteries with fully professed nuns was quite firmly established by the end of the sixteenth century.

Yet across the different regions of Europe, semi-religious women continued to proliferate outside monastery walls. In 1616, the Congregation of Regulars at the Vatican noted that while tertiary nuns were not approved, they were tolerated (‘non si approvano, se ben si tollerano’) (Medioli 1997, p. 264). Bizzoche were not routinely viewed as models of female sanctity. In late sixteenth-century Spain, the nomenclature ‘beata’ (blessed) used for semi-religious women itself generated an ambivalent response as nobody could claim to be truly blessed in their own lifetime, and the name ‘beata’ hinted at false piety (Weber 2016b, p. 331).

The persistence of semi-religious women living outside the cloister in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries attests to an ignoring of the established Church rules by many women, who refused to give up their personal preferences and instead fashioned a religious identity for themselves as they sought to participate in a form of religious activism while still living a secular life.

A striking and sharp increase in monastic women following the Tridentine reforms occurred all over Europe, including in Malta. New monasteries were founded, and the number of women joining them burgeoned, with women crowding into the available spaces. Marriage was not a welcome or possible choice for all women, and a religious life was a respectable option, particularly for women from families with a middling social status upwards. Recent scholarship (Schutte 2011) has also explored social pressures that forced monasticism and a religious life on both daughters and sons of families who desired to give them relatively smaller religious dowries to be able to provide larger portions to their primogeniture sons and the daughters selected for marriage. The situation was different for girls who could not afford the dowry or those from lower social strata, some of whom were able to enter monasteries as servant nuns or converse either with a much smaller dowry or none at all.

As a closer look at individual life stories of monastic nuns demonstrates, it would be mistaken to assume that girls entering monastic life were largely forced to do so. Many welcomed the choice, and some even joined against their families’ wishes, motivated by their strong religious enthusiasm or, in specific circumstances, perhaps to escape an unwelcome marriage or a difficult family situation. The cases of those applying to leave provide fascinating insights into the social constraints experienced by early modern women but may provide a skewed view if taken as representative examples, as they are better recorded than the opinions of the silent majority who did not object to monastic life or embraced it. In any case, tertiaries or bizzoche were generally older than the typical teenaged novices who entered monasteries and do not fit the picture of a young girl bowing to the wishes or financial needs of her family. Ecclesiastical rules stipulated that bizzoche had to be at least forty years old to take their vows and obtain official permission from the episcopal authorities.

4. Gathering the Evidence

Thus, despite efforts by prelates to suppress female tertiaries and other bizzoche after the Council of Trent, throughout the seventeenth century in Malta, as in other cities and regions in Europe, some women opted to live at home and outside the enclosure of the cloister as bizzoche or tertiary nuns. These women chose their own vocational paths, with significant numbers expressing their semi-religious lay status in their daily lives and activities, clothes and social networks. Some of these bizzoche had formal authorisation from the bishop to wear a habit and profess as tertiaries, while others simply donned a habit and followed their preferred lifestyle as bizzoche without gaining the required approvals from the episcopal authorities. Who were these women? What were their names, and what do we know about their lives and aspirations?

Piecing together details of the biographies of these women is not an easy task. As no broader study yet exists, it is only possible to understand their lives working from the bottom up, especially through archival documents, which provide details on individual women. Until the 1670s, fragments of their names and histories could only be gathered individually and laboriously, in the dispersed and incomplete documentation of various archives.

The notarial archives reveal, for example, names of bizzoche who made wills, gave donations or bought and leased property. Unlike monastic nuns who professed perpetual solemn vows and renounced ownership of all their material assets, tertiaries only took simple vows and retained ownership of their possessions and inheritances, which they could use or dispose of through their wills or in donations to family members or good causes. Bizzoche were also sometimes mentioned in the wills of relatives.

Parish death records reveal names when they include the status of the deceased as a tertiary or refer to her as ‘Sor’ or ‘Soru’ (sister). Other ecclesiastical archives also provide names of bizzoche and tertiaries in court cases (processi) at the episcopal or inquisitorial tribunals, in the Acta Civile series or in petitions (suppliche) to the Church authorities.

A regular set of records of petitions by bizzoche, applying for permission to wear a religious habit and dating from 1670 onwards, has survived at the archiepiscopal archives in Malta, providing a rich source of information. This was prompted by the recently appointed Bishop of Malta, Lorenzo Astiria, who, in 1670, renewed an edict obliging all women wishing to wear, or continue to wear, a religious habit to apply for permission to do so. Better records now began to be kept of secular tertiaries living at home. Among the ensuing petitions were some by women who had already been wearing a religious habit for many years. For example, in 1670, Domenica Brincat of Zebbug noted in her petition that she had already been wearing the religious habit of the Order of St. Augustine for the last twenty-five years and that she now wished to profess. In 1672, Anna Muscat of Valletta applied for renewed permission, noting that she was around forty-six years old and had professed as a Carmelite tertiary around seventeen years earlier with permission from the late Bishop Balaguer.5

At various synods held in seventeenth-century and eighteenth-century Malta, prelates referred to the decree of 1616 of the Congregation of Regulars at the Vatican, which established that tertiary nuns living at home could be permitted to wear a religious habit, according to strict rules.6 Among the conditions were that they had to be over forty years old and able to sustain themselves financially, and any men living in the same house had to be first-degree relatives, that is, either fathers, brothers or sons. Thus, bizzoche in Malta either lived alone or in small households with other women or close male relatives. They were not supposed to wear a religious habit without having been approved by the bishop or vicar general and having obtained a licence in writing. In 1617, the Bishop of Malta, Baldassare Cagliares, issued an edict on these lines.7 Over subsequent years, some women complied with this requirement, as can be seen in petitions submitted by the elderly Vincenza Testaferrata in 1618 and by Paola Mellechi in 1646, who specified that she wanted to continue to live in her own house. The written record suggests, however, that until the 1670s, most women who wanted to wear a religious habit did so without bothering to obtain official permission.

In their petitions, these women described their income, typically in the form of rent from a house or field that they had inherited, and they were questioned about their age. Witnesses were asked to testify about the general character and behaviour of the petitioner. Age, income and good character were the main criteria on which the episcopal authorities based their decision on whether a woman was granted official permission to wear a religious habit. The Curia did not stipulate any rules about lifestyle or liturgical matters in this documentation but generally only granted or denied permission to wear a distinctive habit.

The importance of clothing as a cultural symbol indicating the social status of an individual should not be underestimated. Dress codes also helped to ensure that the hierarchical order of society was maintained, together with any related privileges. Religious clothing was highly regulated throughout the medieval and early modern periods. Detailed norms were observed regarding display, including in all processions and public ceremonies or rituals, with forms of dress and clothing playing a major role. In the case of monastic nuns, bishops repeatedly insisted on the types of fabric as well as hems, sleeves and so on that they should wear. A change in status associated with certain privileges could include modifications in the rules of dress. The dress of tertiary nuns was also given due importance. When women wore religious habits without permission from prelates, this created a serious problem. In discussions on whether a woman was a recognised bizzoca or not, a lot of attention was paid to whether she had official permission to wear a religious habit.

The importance of wearing a habit emerges frequently in petitions to the bishop. When the forty-year-old Paola Mellechi of Vittoriosa petitioned in 1646 to be allowed to wear a religious habit while living at her own home, she spoke of her great desire to wear the habit of St. Dominic (‘il gran desiderio … di esser vestita … habito di S. Domenico’).8 When the 80-year-old Vincenza Testaferrata, widow of Giacomo, requested permission in 1618 to be allowed to live as a Dominican tertiary, she articulated her request as wanting to wear the habit of St. Dominic (‘desidera portare l’habito di San Domenico e farsi tertiaria di questa Ordine’). There is more knowledge to be gleaned from such records, as Vincenza also provides us with an example of a seventeenth-century Maltese widow from a relatively affluent family opting to live a semi-religious life. Similar cases of pious and well-established widows include the Dominican tertiary Caterina Saura in 1604, widow of the medical doctor Mario Saura and mother of the doctor Nicola Saura, who later founded an important charitable hospital in Rabat. Her sister-in-law, Giovannella Laurea, did the same, becoming a Dominican tertiary in 1614 after the death of her husband. Imperia Xerri, widow of the prominent landowner Gregorio Xerri, donned a Dominican habit in the 1620s.9 To draw a comparison with the ‘dévotes’ women in seventeenth-century France, Elizabeth Rapley has noted that ‘many pious women vowed their widowhood to God, even before the death of their husbands’. In Counter-Reformation France, prominent groups of upper-class women were aware of the possibilities and outlet that the practice of religion offered them, and they ‘forsook frivolity for piety, and signalled their conversion by wearing sober clothes and, when they went outside, an enveloping black cape’ (Rapley 1990, p. 17). The distinction of wearing an enveloping black cape is, however, not relevant to Malta, as practically all secular women wore a hooded cape when they left the house, typically black and known as a ‘għonnella’. However, the importance attached to the wearing of a religious habit emerges clearly in archival documentation.

The significance of wearing simple clothing or habits also emerges in studies of semi-religious women in other regions. Ashley Tickle Odebiyi has examined eleven communities of bizzoche in fifteenth-century Rome, with many coming from the elite families of the city. She notes that there was ‘some suspicion and hostility towards bizzoche as the adoption of simple habits by elite women could be perceived as performative rather than sincere’ (Odebiyi 2025, p. 5). She shows that their practices, including their habit and acts of piety, shared similarities with non-cloistered religious women across Europe and separated them from both cloistered nuns and laywomen. This points to ‘a broader women’s movement that transcended geographic space’, noting that ‘investigating such a shared repertoire can provide insight into a universal practice that, at the same time, was dependent on local contexts’ (Odebiyi 2025, pp. 1–2).

The dress adopted by bizzoche in late medieval Rome marked them as morally upright women and safeguarded their reputation as they moved around in public streets, especially distinguishing them from dishonest women such as prostitutes (Odebiyi 2025, p. 5). Single women, whether unmarried or widowed, could jeopardise the family honour if they lived at home without the protection of a male relative. Similar concerns existed in Malta, prompting action by the episcopal authorities due to some ‘dishonest’ women, including prostitutes (meretrici) wearing religious habits. On 15 March 1618, Bishop Cagliares issued an edict on bizzoche, to which he added the following five days later:

‘Having in the past days promulgated the edict of the Sacred Congregation of Bishops and Regulars about the habit and clothing of tertiaries or bizzoche, we hear with great sorrow that many prostitutes and dishonest women publicly go about dressed with the habits of different religious orders and with no fear and very little respect for God, they abuse by many illicit acts the honesty and veneration due to such habits. Wishing to avoid this as we are obliged to do by virtue of holy obedience, we instruct that in future no dishonest woman or courtesan nor any woman who serves prostitutes or lives in their house, for no reason or occasion whatsoever, shall presume to wear the habit of any order without our express permission and in writing and with the consent of the superior of the order whose habit they wish to wear, under penalty of the whip for any who violate this rule’.10

While Cagliares was trying to regulate bizzoche and tertiaries, at the same time, he was here accepting in principle that their semi-religious status was acceptable. Acknowledging that the matter was still far from regulated, the same instructions were repeated in later edicts by Bishop Balaguer in 1635 and 1653. Another edict with the same instructions issued by Bishop Astiria in 1670 resulted in a series of petitions that continued over the next century and which have survived at the episcopal archives.11 Nonetheless, the situation must have persisted, as Bishop Molina reissued the same instructions in 1678, now besides the penalty of the whip also adding on the threat of exile from the diocese for those who did not comply.

The problem of prostitution in Valletta was a significant one. In around 1595, the Order of St. John had set up the monastery of St. Mary Magdalene to cater for women who were either prostitutes or who had serious marital problems (malmaritate) in order to provide shelter and get them off the streets. The women in this institution were known as ‘repentite’ or ‘convertite’. They lived as regulars and many of them professed the Franciscan Rule of Third Order with relatively more lenient cloistral rules than the other female monasteries (Aquilina 2011, pp. 1, 58). Another institution for religious women known as the monastery of St. Catherine, or initially ‘of the Presentation of the Virgin at the Temple’, was colloquially referred to as being for orphan girls (orfanelle), and it catered for young, abandoned girls without family or the daughters of prostitutes and courtesans, who were in danger of leading dissolute lives. The drive to ensure that only honest women could roam the street freely wearing habits and that prostitutes should be recognisable too should be understood in this context at a time when, as mentioned earlier, clothing was an important distinguishing marker for all roles and ranks in society. The importance given in the petitions after 1670 to the fact that potential secular tertiaries could support themselves financially and did not need to work outside the home to earn money forms part of the same picture.

Through studying the social activities of tertiary women in Bergamo and Bologna, Lehtsalu (2018) has proposed that they offered education, care and companionship to women who were unable to obtain these from female monasteries or custodial institutions such as orphanages and conservatories, providing a contribution to society in Counter-Reformation Italy, which was valued by both ecclesiastical and secular authorities. Moreover, she proposes to move away from the focus on ‘enclosure’ that has characterised so much of the study into early modern women religious to date and to instead study their social roles and activities as a principal category of analysis (Lehtsalu 2018, p. 53). A difficulty with this approach in the Maltese context is that evidence about the activities of early female third orders is quite sparse. Most tertiaries and bizzoche in Malta lived privately at home and not in regular communities where their activities might have been better recorded. An exception here is the enclosed community of the Magdalene monastery in Valletta, some of whom, as mentioned above, professed the Franciscan Rule of the Third Order (Aquilina 2011, p. 1). In the late eighteenth century, the tertiary Paulica Vassallo resided with the enclosed Benedictine nuns at St. Peter’s monastery in Mdina, giving her a status comparable to that of a regular tertiary. She may have needed to observe less strict rules of enclosure than those followed by the rest of the community. The nuns of St. Peter’s also rented a house in Rabat to another tertiary nun, Mariola Cilia.

While a number of bizzoche came from prominent or affluent families, the surviving petitions from 1670 onwards demonstrate that they had mixed backgrounds. This indicates that a semi-religious lifestyle lay within the reach of a wider range of women than the option of joining a monastery. Despite the expectation that female tertiaries should not work outside the home, in 1606, the Carmelite tertiary Giovanna was the domestic servant of Fra Centorio Cagnolo, a prior of the Order of St. John, while in 1627, the Carmelite tertiary Agata Zarb was the servant of Mariettina Cassar in Mdina. Another Carmelite, Domenica Mamo, was a gardener at the Lunzjata church in Rabat in the 1650s. In the 1730s, the 60-year-old bizzoca Angelica Casha of Birkirkara worked a loom as a cotton spinner (‘filare bambone e lino’).

Some bizzoche were the daughters and sisters of artisans and craftsmen, including goldsmiths, artists or carpenters. The Carmelite tertiary Maria de Dominici was the daughter of a silversmith and was herself an artist who worked in the bottega of the Calabrian artist Mattia Preti in Valletta in the 1670s. She moved to Rome in 1682 and was affiliated with the Carmelites of Santa Maria de Traspontina and was buried in their church when she died in 1703 (Xuereb 2021). However, while some semi-religious women evidently did work and provided services to earn money, most appear to have had enough funds to live, more or less comfortably, on rent from agricultural land or other property. Financial independence with sufficient income to live on was one of the requirements for obtaining official permission to wear a religious habit. Unlike the religious dowries required to enter monasteries, however, the income needed to live as a tertiary was not stipulated as a fixed amount. The Franciscan tertiaries Maria Maddalena and Anna Florinda Hagius of Valletta were the daughters of notary Tomaso Hagius and Graziulla Gatt12, and their parents provided them with sufficient income from properties in Valletta to be able to profess at a monastery if they had wished to do so, and in fact, their sisters Teresa and Flora both professed as nuns at St. Peter’s monastery in Mdina. Maria Maddalena and Anna Florinda petitioned for episcopal permission to live as tertiaries in 1675 when they were only twenty-six and seventeen years old, respectively, when they had already been wearing a habit for some time.

It was not uncommon for two sisters to both become tertiaries and continue living together at home or for small groups of tertiary women to share the same residence. In 1640, the knight of the Order of St. John, Comm. Fra Massimiliano Dampun, bought a house in Valletta (today North Street) and gave it to Suor Speranza Balzano to enjoy for her lifetime, after which it was to revert to the Order (Denaro 1962, p. 58). This reveals that some members of the Order of St. John did not oppose semi-religious women living at home and, at times even, supported them financially. Twenty-seven years later, in 1667, when she was around seventy-five years old, Speranza was living in Valletta in a household of four women, with two younger bizzoche, Domenica Cassar and Caterina Pensa, both around forty years old, and another woman, Maria Cassar.13 In another case, in 1667, four bizzoche with the same surname all lived in the same house in Valletta, suggesting that they might have been four sisters or cousins—Caterina, Teresa, Clara and Orsolina Borg.14

Female tertiaries appear to have interacted as groups and provided one another with support, as in 1677, a tertiary nun is described as being the ‘prioress’ of the Franciscan tertiary nuns. This was Maria ‘macaroni’ (‘detta delli maccaroni’), and she had a son who was a soldier on a ship.15 In the 1690s, a Dominican prior is identified as the head or director of the Dominican nuns (‘magistri sororum conventus’) in Malta, and acceptance by the prior is noted occasionally in the petitions after 1670. By the fifteenth century, the Dominican Order had drawn up a model of penitent sanctity, including regular prayer, fasting and eucharistic devotion, that could be followed on a daily basis by pious women who could not, or did not want to, enter a monastery (Lehmijoki-Gardner 2005). Further study might shed light on the model which Dominican and other tertiary women in Malta were expected to follow, such as their hours of prayer or times of fasting, and whether or how often they gathered in the churches of their religious orders. Numerous examples in the death registers of various parishes of Malta indicate that female tertiaries enjoyed the privilege of being buried in the churches of their religious orders.

In 1680, the Bishop of Malta, Miguel de Molina, held a synod at the Mdina Cathedral and paid attention to bizzoche (Synodus Melevitana 1681, pp. 115–16). His successor, Bishop Davide Cocco Palmieri, also focused on tertiaries in his synod of 1703 (Synodus Diocesana 1842, pp. 137–38). He also included interviewing bizzoche in his pastoral visits to the various localities of Malta in 1684 and 1708–1709. Bizzoche lived in towns and villages all over the island, although there seem to have been notably bigger clusters in particular places, such as Augustinian and Dominican female tertiaries in the village of Zebbug, who may have been linked to the two convents of Augustinian and Dominican friars in nearby Rabat. Some would have received spiritual guidance from the friars of their orders. In 1676, the Franciscan priest Fra Giuseppe Maria Ghimes, whose religious name was ‘Giuseppe Maria della Carità’, was the spiritual advisor of the Franciscan tertiary Francesca Protopsalti. In a case before the Inquisition that took place after her death in 1677, Ghimes reported that Suor Francesca had professed in Sicily on the feast of St. Francis before the Provincial Prior of the Order. He notes that she had professed solemn and perpetual vows of poverty, chastity and obedience and had taken on the religious name Maria Francesca ‘della Croce’ as was confirmed by her extraordinary spiritual advisor, the Spanish Jesuit Padre Gasto.

Schutte has explored the phenomenon of visionaries in Venice, where between 1618 and 1750, nine women and seven men, a mixture of religious and lay persons, of whom only one woman was possibly a tertiary. They attracted the interest of the authorities because of their reported visions and revelations, which were dismissed by the Roman Inquisition in Venice as cases of the ‘pretense of holiness’ (Schutte 2001). A similar case in Malta involved the same Franciscan tertiary Francesca Protopsalti, who died during the plague epidemic that occurred between December 1675 and August 1676, one of the worst outbreaks of the disease in Maltese history. After her death, her Franciscan confessor, Gio. Maria Ghimes distributed some of her belongings to be venerated as relics and wrote her vita or biography in three small volumes. These were passed on to the Inquisition in Malta by the priest Don Thomaso Vella, canon of the Mdina Cathedral. To provide some social and religious context to Suor Francesca’s vita, it is possible that Ghimes was inspired by another recent hagiographical text recounting the vita of the Maltese monastic nun, Suor Geltruda Cumbo, around whom a cult developed in the 1660s and 1670s. Geltruda had died at the Discalced Carmelite monastery of St. Theresa in Palermo in 1656 in ‘the odour of sanctity’. Partly based on testimonies about Geltruda gathered from people following her cult in Malta, her biography was written by the Sicilian Discalced Carmelite Giovanni della Croce and published in Rome in 1670. In that book, the same Canon Don Thomaso Vella had himself been involved in reporting one of the presumed miracles that took place at the female Benedictine monastery of St. Scholastica in Birgu, of which he was then rector (Caruana Dingli 2024).

Francesca Protopsalti’s case was referred to the Inquisition in Rome, and it was decided to be a case of falsely claimed sanctity (‘santità pretesa’ or ‘finta’). Instructions were given to burn the vita written by Ghimes and to gather and destroy all items connected with her, such as her cord, cilices and bits of garments that were being venerated as holy relics, and to secretly exhume her body and rebury it in a common grave. Ghimes was held at the inquisitorial prison in Birgu while several witnesses were heard at the Inquisition tribunal. The case had been reported to the Inquisition in Malta by another tertiary, the Carmelite Maria de Dominici, mentioned above, who was her cousin and did not believe in the sanctity of Suor Francesca.16

The Inquisition tribunals were regularly preoccupied with having to decide whether cases involving ecstaties and stigmata, or revelations of some sort, were true or feigned or perhaps the work of the devil (Ciappara 2014). As can be expected, occasionally, the individuals under examination were semi-religious women. The bizzoca Angelica Casha of Birkirkara had visions and her advice was sought by many, such as by the monastic Benedictine nun Persia Preziosi at St. Peter’s monastery in Mdina, who in 1736, exchanged letters about the rumoured abilities of this bizzoca Angelica with the Franciscan Minor priest Saverio di Malta of Rabat. Eventually, Suor Persia gave Padre Saverio a small wax figure of Baby Jesus to pass on to Angelica on her behalf, and she asked him to request Angelica for information about the state of the souls of Persia’s parents in purgatory.17 Similar visionary women were certainly not restricted to bizzoche, and interest in communicating with the dead through a medium has persisted over the centuries and religions, as seen in widely known examples such as the writer Elizabeth Barrett Browning and her circle in Victorian Britain (Porter 1958). In early modern Europe, mystical and supernatural experiences were part of the everyday imagination and mainstream expressions of religiosity. One problem for the Church was that visionary or mystical individuals could threaten traditional religious authority; therefore, a watchful eye was maintained over such reports. Bishops struggled to exert their authority over semi-religious women, and any bizzoche that were seen to be gaining credibility and influence in the community due to their special visionary powers would have intensified their problems.

Weber has studied the efforts made by the Jesuits in early modern Spain to understand and regulate semi-religious women who evoked such ambivalent reactions. On the one hand, these women lived reclusive, religious lives, but at times, they could also make false claims to sainthood. In 1575, the Supreme Council of the Inquisition circulated a letter to the local tribunals ‘asking for their opinion on the best way to deal with the problem of single women who enjoyed an unusual degree of independence from male authority, appeared not to engage in productive work, and claimed special spiritual gifts’ (Weber 2016b, p. 331). There were a great number of such women in early modern Spain, and the Jesuits took a special interest in the matter. Weber examines three late sixteenth-century texts that addressed ‘the problem of laywomen’s spirituality’, taking both cautionary and apologetic approaches to beatas, written by the Spanish Jesuits Baltasar Álvarez, Pedro de Ribadeneyra and Alonso de Andrade, respectively. These writings illustrate the problem that beatas could pose by challenging priestly authority and the social order, yet the authors also recognise that pious laywomen could support the goals of the Catholic reformation.

5. Conclusions

Despite post-Tridentine efforts by Church authorities to suppress the autonomy of female religious expression outside the cloister, a significant number of women in seventeenth-century Malta—as in other parts of Europe—continued to pursue semi-religious lives. These women carved out alternative vocational identities as bizzoche or tertiary nuns. Some acquired formal recognition from the episcopate, while others assumed the habit without official sanction, instead adhering to personally chosen religious practices.

In early modern Malta, most female tertiaries and bizzoche lived privately in domestic settings rather than in formal religious communities. Consequently, their activities were often under-recorded in ecclesiastical documentation. However, archival evidence suggests that these women established informal networks with some level of communal organisation and recognition. It was not uncommon for a few tertiaries to cohabit, forming pockets of small semi-communal living arrangements. Ecclesiastical authorities frequently discussed such women at local synods held throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Notably, the Maltese Curia did not impose detailed regulations regarding their liturgical practices or daily lives, instead focusing on granting or denying permission to adopt a religious habit.

The identities and aspirations of these women remain largely obscure. Reconstructing their biographies is complicated by the fragmented and incomplete nature of surviving documentation. Surviving petitions from the 1670s onwards reveal that their social backgrounds were diverse; however, prior to this period, information about individual bizzoche can so far only be gleaned through archival research in scattered sources, as no comprehensive study currently exists. This paper has attempted to provide an initial survey of some of the available material.

The ongoing presence of semi-religious women outside cloistered life throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries testifies to the resilience of female religious agency. These women challenged ecclesiastical norms by cultivating religious identities on their own terms, negotiating between the secular and the sacred and participating in forms of lay religious activism that remained outside institutional control.

The history of semi-religious laywomen provides rich material for a more nuanced understanding of the roles and aspirations of women in early modern Malta. Much remains to be discovered about early modern women in archival material that is still obscure. Illuminating the diverse lives of bizzoche and tertiaries enhances the wider historical picture by adding previously unknown stories, images and colour to the canvas. Recovering their voices provides fresh insights into attitudes towards religion and gender in early modern society.